Hi all, The other day a customer of mine was having this issue on Windows 7 : CreateProcessAsUser fails with error 5 (Access Denied) when using Jobs . So he had a Windows service running as System in Session 0, that service created a process running as System in Session 0 too, and this process tried...

Hi all, The other day I worked on a support case where a Windows service running as System in Session 0 was creating a process also running as System in Session 0 , and this new process failed to create another process in the logged-on user's session (Session 2 in this particular case). And it failed...

Hi all, A customer of mine wanted to change the error messages shown to users when changing their password on Windows 7, e.g. when new and old passwords won't match, or the old password of the user is invalid, etc. On Windows XP they did that with a custom Gina . They wondered if they could do this...

Hi all, The following C# sample shows how to create a memory mapped file and use private namespaces to allow access to specific groups of users: FORM1.CS using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Data; using System.Drawing; using System.Linq;...

Hi all, Some time ago a customer of mine was getting a CryptographicException with message "The Smart card resource manager is not running" when using X509Certificate2 object in a Windows service . This was the call stack at the point of exception: at System.Security.Cryptography.Utils.CreateProvHandle...

Hi all, If you call SCardEstablishContext API in a Windows service running under a specific user account (domain\user) or NETWORK SERVICE , you may get the following error on Vista/Server 2008 or Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 : 0x8010001d - SCARD_E_NO_SERVICE - "The Smart card resource manager is not...

Hi all, A customer of mine was trying to monitor a .log file in a specific folder with .NET's FileSystemWatcher class and a code like the following: static void Main(string[] args) { FileSystemWatcher fsw = new FileSystemWatcher(@"C:\mypath", "myfile.log"); fsw.NotifyFilter = NotifyFilters...

Hi all, A customer of mine was using some web pages to enroll certificates. When using them on Windows 7 and IE8/IE9 , they got a popup dialog with a message like the following: --------------------------- Web Access Confirmation --------------------------- This Web site is attempting to perform...

Hi all, The other day a customer of mine was trying to disable the pop up dialog that Windows shows after an application crashes . On Windows XP , they could get rid of it by going to "Control Panel > System Properties > Advanced > Error reporting" , clicking on "Disable error reporting...

Hi all, When using .NET's EnvelopedCMS to decode a file that is larger than 5 MB , you may get the following exception on Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 : Unhandled Exception: System.Security.Cryptography. CryptographicException : ASN1 out of memory . at System.Security.Cryptography.Pkcs.EnvelopedCms...

Hi all, Some time ago a customer of mine reported the following issue with SetWindowsHookEx API: Their application had global hooks to monitor for both keyboard and mouse input. On Windows 7 , and under high CPU usage, those hooks were getting lost . They tried several things to solve the issue...

Hello all, I recently posted about this issue: CertEnroll control won't work when hosted inside a frame/iframe in IE8 . I already mentioned that this was an issue on Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 , and proposed a few ways to work around this issue. Well, I have good news!!! We have already released...

Hi all, You may get errors like the following when using CertEnroll control in a web page hosted inside another page's frame/iframe : CertEnroll::CX509EnrollmentWebClassFactory::CreateObject: Unspecified error 0x80004005 (-2147467259) CertEnroll::CX509EnrollmentWebClassFactory::CreateObject...

Hi all, From time to time I like to post about other issues which are not related to crypto stuff, but I consider useful because of the number of request I get on them. And this is one common question I've seen: how do I set sound volume programmatically on Windows? On Windows XP we can manipulate...

Hi all, The answer to the question of the title is YES, OF COURSE ! Why wouldn't it? Well, the reason of this question is the following: you may already know that CAPICOM has been deprecated on Windows 7 ( CAPICOM support on Windows 7 ). It was going to be deprecated when Vista came out, but it didn...

Hi all, CAPICOM has finally been deprecated , and it won't be supported on Windows 7 . This link is up to date and proposes alternatives to CAPICOM classes by using .NET classes and CryptoAPI : Alternatives to Using CAPICOM . The following article may help if you were using CAPICOM in your web site...